What is a 'strategy'?

The Media Strategies API offers a number of strategies. Each strategy is designed to answer common business questions using data from a PYLON data source.

For example the top_urls strategy analyzes the top pieces of content for a topic or and audience. You can use this strategy to answer questions such as - 'What are the top pieces of content for the topic of Artificial Intelligence?'

A strategy contains all the necessary logic, analysis steps, and data science techniques required to answer the business question.

When you run a strategy all of the work required to answer the use case is carried out by the strategy behind the scenes. By using a strategy you can answer complex analysis questions using simple API calls.

How do you run a strategy?

You run strategies using the DataSift API. The API uses an asyncronous workflow as analysis can take a number of seconds to complete.

To run a strategy you:

queue a new strategy task for processing - stating the strategy you'd like to run and the parameters for the strategy.

monitor the status of the strategy task - waiting until the task has completed.

fetch the result of the strategy task.

You can queue multiple strategy tasks at a time and build rich reports from the results of many strategies.

What work does the strategy do?

The work carried out by the strategy varies depending on the use case it addresses.

As an example the top_urls strategy identifies the top pieces of content for an audience relating to a topic. This strategy will:

analyze the content being engaged with by your audience for the topic.

analyze the content being engaged with by the comparison audience you've chosen.

compare the content being engaged with by your audience, versus the comparison audience.

return the pieces of content which are most engaging for your specific audience.

The strategy runs multiple analysis queries against the PYLON data source to gather the data needed, then uses various data science techniques to return a high-quality result.